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If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’ve been placed on hold at least once in your lifetime. In fact, 45% of customers can’t remember having a recent positive experience, and 35% of them say it was directly related to poor response times. This is a serious problem since timeliness is the most important thing a company can do to provide good service. When organizations make customers wait for assistance, it can force them to seriously question why they still do business with you at all. Take a quick look at onholdwith.com for some shocking insight on hold time offenders.

Okay, okay, we’ve spelled out why hold times are so terrible, but unfortunately they are still a regular occurrence. Let’s see how we can try and make it a little more bearable. Here are 6 things you can do to make it through those long, lonely, wait times:Continue reading →

Velocity Credit Union is based in Austin and has served the area since 1947. It is one of the largest financial institutions in the state of Texas with over $840 million in assets, and provides personalized banking to more than 84,000 members across six local branches.

Velocity takes pride in making its members feel valued, and in creating a positive customer experience, however their current service offering was not meeting these goals. Velocity was struggling with long hold times and a high number of abandoned calls. They thought they had to replace their legacy call center system to correct this problem – which would be costly and time consuming. Continue reading →

Onholdwith.com is a community-driven platform that aims to end hold time for customers. The website tracks companies who are experiencing the most complaints on Twitter from people waiting on hold. It’s our way of recognizing which businesses need to improve their call center hold times, and could benefit from a call-back solution like Fonolo’s. But the most interesting part of onholdwith.com are the tweets themselves.

By the time someone has taken to social media to unleash their innermost hold-time frustrations, the result can be truly eye-opening, and sometimes pretty darn hilarious. I mean, if you’re waiting on hold for 4 hours, you have to find humor in hearing, “Your call is important to us, please hold,” for the 89th time, right?

We’ve looked at the top 10 hold time offenders this month, and scoured their Twitter complaints to compile some of the most cringe-worthy responses to waiting on hold.

Recently, Shai Berger, CEO of Fonolo had the pleasure of speaking with former model turned entrepreneur, Kathy Ireland, on Worldwide Business. The interview aired on FOX Business Network and Bloomberg International, and gave Fonolo the opportunity to share how it’s revolutionary technology is fixing the problem of waiting on hold. The company has helped to alleviate some of the most universal challenges in the contact center, such as: reducing abandonment rates, smoothing out spikes in call volume, and lowering operating costs. In turn, Fonolo’s solutions have transformed the customer experience and the way many call centers do business today.

The objective for this year’s CCW Conference & Expo is to strengthen the contact center’s foundation for future transformation. As innovation in the call center space grows and customer expectations increase, this is a mission Fonolo can get behind. That’s why we’re excited to be exhibiting once again at the 18th Annual Call Center Week Conference & Expo, June 26 – June 30, 2017, at The Mirage in Las Vegas.

The CCW Conference and Expo will empower leaders to test, learn and try the next big thing in customer experience optimization. Here’s your chance to see how Fonolo can help you smooth out spikes in call volume, eliminate hold-time, and reduce abandon rates!

Monday: It’s the start of a new week and everyone is back to reality, trying to check everything off their “To-Do” lists. The problem? Mondays are notorious for high agent absenteeism. Whether it’s falling ill or just wanting to extend the weekend, being understaffed on Monday’s is commonplace in the contact center world. This, coupled with high call volume, can create a major meltdown for any call center.

However, there is a rather simple solution that can help smooth out those dreaded spikes in call volume, while making life easier for those agents who showed up to work.

Every year Fonolo recognizes contact centers who are dedicated to reducing hold time, thereby delivering a superior customer experience. This year is no different! We are excited to acknowledge three amazing organizations for their outstanding achievements. The following companies have worked diligently to improve agent engagement, while also enhancing the customer experience, and we are honored to be part of their ongoing transformation.

Historically, great customer service depended on one thing: people. Call center agents acted as the main liaison for delivering a positive or negative customer experience. But in our world of multi-channel communications, the need for speed has changed the game. According to Forrester, 73% of people say that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide them with good service, which is why hold times present a major challenge for the customer service industry. If your business offers support, then you know how demanding customers can be, and how important reducing wait times are to overall satisfaction levels.

To understand how companies are handling hold times, Fonolo launched the website onholdwith.com, which tracks complaints on Twitter from people waiting on hold. We found that these companies had the highest mention of hold time complaints on Twitter. Recently, Fonolo’s CEO, Shai Berger had the chance to speak with ABC News: 7on Your Side with Michael Finney to discuss how this social media uprising can lend a hand to eliminating hold time for good. See the full clip below:

I recently read a great analogy on what it feels like to call customer service today. Imagine being a child again and asked to do your math homework – a subject you’re unfortunately not very good at. You end up procrastinating the task for as long as possible because deep down you know it will take much longer than expected, and somewhere in the process you’ll be throwing up your hands in frustration. Speaking to a live agent is amazingly similar to doing your dreaded math homework.

Calling customer support is an incredibly annoying task that often becomes overwhelmingly frustrating. First, you’ve got to find the correct phone number for your region, then you have to listen to the maddening automated system to navigate your way to the right department, and more often than not, you’ll be stuck with some elevator music while you wait on hold to speak to an actual human.

In an effort to make this experience a little less frustrating we’ve constructed some ways that you can avoid hold time and get an answer to your question quicker.

If you’ve ever tweeted about waiting on hold with a call center your frustrations have likely been cataloged on onholdwith.com. The site scans Twitter for complaints about being on hold with customer service and categorizes them in real-time by company and industry name. Fonolo launched onholdwith.com as a public service so that people could vent about being on hold while organizations can see how much goodwill they were losing from customers.

For many, simply knowing that they are not alone provides comfort during an otherwise anxiety ridden experience. The larger purpose of the site is to bring greater awareness to the problem of long hold times and help companies benefit from Fonolo’s call-back solutions. If you head on over to the site, you’ll see that we’ve done a complete overhaul in hopes of giving customers and companies a better chance to share their stories and correct this problem. Continue reading →